The boy's done good as Will Smith stars alongside son

He's come close a couple of times (Unbreakable was suspenseful, and the Village was moody), but he's never quite pulled it off.

Here, in this big-budget sci-fi adventure, the signs were quite promising.

For starters, he brings Will Smith and son Jaden together on screen for the first time since the 2006 drama The Pursuit Of Happyness. My, how Jaden's grown up since then! But again, the end result is something of a mixed bag.

In the distant future, Earth is a devastated wasteland, uninhabited by humans who have relocated to Nova Prime, which is in another solar system.

A peacekeeping force known as The Ranger Corps protects this new community, led by valiant General Cypher Raige (Will Smith), who pioneered a way to overcome fear and leads the humans to victory against a vicious race of aliens called the S'krell.

Reckless

Cypher's son Kitai (Jaden Smith) trains to become a member of The Ranger Corps in order to impress his father and relieve himself of his guilt about the death of his sister, Senshi (Kravitz).

While Cypher is level-headed, Kitai is impetuous and reckless, and his application to join the Corps is rejected. So Cypher's wife Faia (Okonedo) implores her husband to bond with Kitai during a voyage into space.

It's a good idea, but the subsequent mission almost ends in disaster and father and son become stranded on Earth at the mercy of the voracious creatures which now call the desolate planet their home.

This is a colourful sci-fi blockbuster which is a perfect vehicle for Smith senior to pass on the action movie mantle to his son, combining elements of I Am Legend and Independence Day with a deeply human story of a soldier struggling to connect with his grief-stricken child. There are some lovely, tender moments in the script that draw heavily on the natural chemistry between the leads.

Unfortunately, the demands of a summer blockbuster and the film's epic scope, achieved through a blitzkrieg of digital effects, tend to overwhelm that fragile and sometimes heartbreaking humanity.

Set 1,000 years after cataclysmic events that almost snuffed out mankind, After Earth is a rites-of-passage story viewed largely through the eyes of a boy desperate to impress his idol.

That central relationship is the glue that holds Shyamalan's film together, when other elements including overblown action sequences threaten to tear the picture apart.

While the characters only have to suppress fear to survive, the two Smiths choose to eradicate almost all tangible emotion from their respective performances. We should be thankful that Shyamalan's unfortunate experience with 3D on his worst piece of work, The Last Airbender, steered the director away from employing the same format here. A menagerie of computer-generated apes, big cats and birds of prey, which hunt Kitai on futuristic Earth, are distressingly unrealistic in 2D, let alone in eye-popping close-up.